Thread by @MCL1965

1/9 What if some of Shakespeare's most famous works were prescient parables about climate change? A look at 'Hamlet', 'Macbeth", 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', and 'King Henry IV, Part 2' through the lens of anthropogenic global warming. First thread of four, this one on 'Hamlet'.

2/9 Hamlet is the heir to the Danish throne whose father, the King, has been murdered by Hamlet's uncle (the King's brother). Not content with fratricide, the uncle then marries the King's widow (Hamlet's mother) and usurps the throne.

3/9 The dramatic tension in 'Hamlet' stems from the hero's attempt to resolve this horrifying and unnatural situation, and the tragedy stems from Hamlet's fatal character flaw – he is a chronic ditherer, and delays taking action time and again until it is too late.

4/9 One of the key passages in the play, and one of the most famous speeches in all literature, is the "What a piece of work is a man!" speech, but the most interesting part of this speech for our purposes is not the part about man but the part about the firmament (atmosphere):

5/9 "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this most excellent canopy, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." (Hamlet: Act II, scene ii)

6/9 Hamlet sees the sky above him as "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours" owing to the depression brought on by the unnatural murder of his father by his uncle and his mother's equally unnatural marriage to her husband's murderer.

7/9 And the tragedy consists in Hamlet's delay in restoring the natural order of things by deposing his uncle – in other words, his delay in dealing with the "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours" so as to restore the "majestical roof fretted with golden fire"

8/9 The result of Hamlet's delay and inaction – at least until it's too late – is that the death of his usurping uncle comes at the cost of his own life, that of his lover, his lover's brother, his lover's father, and his own mother. TLDR: Hamlet and all those closest to him die.

9/9 MORAL: If we want to avoid the tragedy of a climate catastrophe, we need to deal with our own "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours" – i.e. the record high levels of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere – before it is too late.

1/19 What if some of Shakespeare's most famous works were prescient parables about climate change and anthropogenic global warming? Second thread of four, this one on 'MACBETH' (@CarbonBubble, @shakespeareinstitute, @ShaxBull, @seek_cymbeline).

2/19 If Hamlet's tragedy stems from his indecision and inaction, Macbeth's tragic flaw is more obviously malign: ambition. Macbeth murders his King (and cousin), Duncan, to usurp the Scottish throne. As with 'Hamlet', the leitmotiv is the disruption of the natural order of things

3/19 The imagery throughout is of darkness and evil stemming from Macbeth's lust for power but overlooked until now in the massive body of literary criticism has been the malignant role of fossil fuels and the redemptive power of nature in re-establishing a net-zero society.

4/19 On the morning after Duncan's murder (and the overturning of the natural order), Lennox refers to the extreme weather events of the night before, and the "dire combustion" associated with them. Published in 1606, it reads like the IPCC's AR5 published 400 years later:

5/19 "The night has been unruly: where we lay,/Lamentings heard i'the air, strange screams of death;/And prophesying, with accents terrible,/Of dire combustion and confus'd events,/Some say the earth was feverous, and did shake." (Act II, scene iii)

6/19 The "dire combustion" can be read as a reference to the disruption of the natural order that flows from burning fossil fuels, confirmed in the next scene where we learn that solar power ("the travelling lamp") has been eclipsed by "dark night" (a metaphor for fossil fuels?):

7/19 "Thou seest, the heavens, as troubled with man's act,/
Threaten his bloody stage: by the clock, 'tis day,/
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp" (II, iv). The eclipse of the sun by the burning of fossil fuels is an image we are all familiar with in our day:

8/19

9/19 Macbeth's lust for power only increases after his murderous usurpation, and the chaos and terror his reign unleashes gets worse as the play progresses. Now the incumbent, he seeks to cling on to his power at any cost, aware of the harm he has done but seeing no way back:

10/19 "I am in blood/Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er" (III, iv) — i.e., as the dirty and corrupt incumbent source of power, Macbeth has no intention of transitioning to a cleaner future: on the contrary, there will be more blood

11/19 As the final act begins, we watch as Lady Macbeth loses her mind. Her guilty conscience leads to her complete mental and nervous disintegration, and she re-enacts Duncan's murder in her sleep., her doctor calling this "a great perturbation in nature" (V, i).

12/19 In a very arresting phrase as she is trying to wash away her guilt and the memory of the blood on her own and her husband's hands, she says: "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand" (V, i). In other words, all the wealth accumulated by the Macbeths ...

13/19 ... as the incumbent source of power can no longer compensate for the harm they have caused. Lady Macbeth cannot bear the guilt any longer and commits suicide but her husband resolves to resist the clean reforestation project that is coming to overwhelm his incumbency.

14/19 Trusting in the witches' prophecy that he will be safe until Birnam Wood comes to his castle — "I will not be afraid of death and bane,/Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane" (V, iii) — he despairs when he learns that the trees of Birnam are indeed now approaching.

15/19 At this point, the dirty and corrupt incumbent power source resolves to die in the face of surging solar and wind power: "I'gin to be aweary of the sun,/And wish th'estate o'th'world were now undone/Blow wind, come wrack! At least we'll die with harness on our back." (V, v)

16/19 The play ends with Macbeth's death and Duncan's son Malcom ascending to the throne, thereby restoring the natural order. The imagery is perfect: the forces of nature (the forest, the sun, and the wind) have triumphed over the forces of darkness and "dire combustion".

17/19 MORAL: The lust for power and the exploitation and disruption of nature leads to "dire combustion", chaos, and corruption. But it also leads, ultimately, to the collapse of any society that chooses this path (e.g. Macbeth's regnum). In the long run, nature always wins.

18/19 MORAL (cont'd) Since Nature is ultimately stronger than any human ordering of the world, there is a brighter future for all if we husband her resources — her forests, the sun, and the wind — in a responsible and sustainable way. We have moral agency so the choice is ours.

19/19 Take your pick.

1/12 What if some of Shakespeare's most famous works were prescient parables about climate change and anthropogenic global warming? Third thread of four, this one on 'A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM' (@CarbonBubble).

2/12 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' contains explicit references to extreme weather events linked to climate change caused by human agency. It also makes a clear link between climate change and food security, animal welfare, and airborne pandemics.

3/12The key passage is in Act II, scene i:

"Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain/As in revenge have suck'd up from the sea/Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land/Hath every pelting river made so proud/That they have overborne their continents.'

4/12 Tatiana here is describing a flood caused by the failure to heed the wind and harness its energy (caused therefore, by implication, by a reliance on fossil fuels instead). We then go on to learn in the same passage that the flood that results from this causes crop failure:

5/12 "The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain/The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn/Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard."

We then learn that the livestock has been lost to plague and is being picked over by carrion birds:

"The fold stands empty in the drownèd field/And crows are fatted with the murrion flock."

6/12 Tatiana then goes on to berate the failure to heed the moon and harness its energy (as the "governess of floods" the moon is responsible for the tides). This failure to use nature's renewable energy has the disastrous further consequence of unleashing air-borne pandemics:

7/12 "Therefore the moon, the governess of floods/Pale in her anger, washes all the air/That rheumatic diseases do abound."

We are then explicitly told that all of these calamities are not isolated or random events but rather part of a clear pattern of climate change:

8/12 "And thorough this temperature we see/The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts/Fall in he fresh lap of the crimson rose/And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown/An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds/Is as in mockery set."

9/12 Indeed, the seasons are completely upended such that people no longer know the difference:

"The spring, the summer/The childing autumn, angry winter, change/Their wonted liveries; and the mazèd world/By their increase, now knows not which is which."

10/12 Finally, Tatiana makes clear that this has all resulted from our failure to heed the wind and the tides and harness their renewable energy. Implication: climate change has been caused by a reliance on fossil fuels, aggravated by a false and dishonest debate over the causes:

'And this same progeny of evils comes/From our debate, from our dissension/We are their parents and original."

11/12: MORAL: The energy solutions we need are renewable and are to be found in the natural world (in this case wind and tidal). Failure to harness their potential — and hence a reliance on fossil-fuel energy sources — will lead to climate change, extreme weather events ...

12/12 MORAL cont'd ... food-security issues, animal-welfare issues, and air-borne pandemics.

In short, the moral is: heed the signals from nature and harness the full potential of renewable energy, or otherwise risk catastrophic climate change.

1/8 What if some of Shakespeare's most famous works were prescient parables about climate change and anthropogenic global warming? Final thread of four, this one on 'KING HENRY IV, Part II' (@CarbonBubble).

2/8 The third in Shakespeare's eight-part history of the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, King Henry IV Part II sees wayward Prince Hal embrace responsibility on assuming the throne as Henry V. Once again, the question of the natural order of things looms large ...

3/8 ... and the key scene that shocks Hal into sudden maturity is Act IV, scene v. His father, dying King Henry IV, accuses Hal of having been derelict in his filial duty and desirous only of taking the crown:

"How quickly nature falls into revolt/When gold becomes her object."

4/8 But this line can also be read as the way that Nature fights back in the face of the greedy and disrespectful objectification and exploitation of her natural resources for instant profit, without due thought or respect given to the notion of inter-generational propriety.

5/8 In other words, Nature is something to be handed down across the generations with reverence, not something to be exploited for a quick profit today with no thought given to the legitimacy of title or the sustainability of its benefits for posterity.

6/8 Failure to heed this counsel will lead to Nature's revolt (climate change) and to stranded assets. And in Act I, scene iiii, we get the most poetic formulation of a stranded asset ever composed:

7/8

"Like one who builds the ;model of an house/
Beyond his power to build it, who, half-through/
Gives o'er, and leaves his part created-cost/
A naked subject to the weeping clouds/
And waste for churlish winter's tyranny."

8/8 MORAL: Nature is entrusted to each generation and requires responsible stewardship so that posterity will enjoy its benefits as much as the present and the past. If this bond of inter-generational trust is broken, Nature will "fall into revolt", resulting in stranded assets.

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